A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling

  In 1887, when he was eighteen, Gandhi finished high school in Rajkot. He went on to a college in another town. He found himself completely at sea; he couldn’t even understand the lectures. The lecturers were good, he says; the trouble was that he was too “raw”: meaning perhaps that he was under-read and knew very little about the world. After a very unhappy term he gave up the college and came home to Rajkot.

  There was a family council. A friend of the family advised that Gandhi shouldn’t persevere with college education; it wasn’t going to get him far, anyway; times had changed in India, and the most he could hope for with a college diploma, if he could get it, was a small administrative job paying ninety rupees a month. What Gandhi should do, the wise friend said, was to go to England and study law. The English law examinations were notoriously easy; seventy-five to ninety per cent of the candidates always passed. The course lasted three years; the total cost would be only three or four thousand rupees; and at the end there would be a glittering barrister’s life.

  For some reason—he doesn’t say exactly why: it couldn’t have been only to get away from the bewildering new college—the idea of England (perhaps more than the study of law) excited Gandhi. He says it made him forget his cowardice. In the hope of getting financial help for his English venture from the government he went to see the British political agent at Porbandar, and he thought it was important to get there as fast as he could. He hired a bullock cart (twenty-four miles a day) for part of the journey, and did the remainder on a camel, though he had never before ridden on a camel. Wasted labour, pointless speed: in Porbandar Gandhi had the merest word with the political agent as the agent was going up a staircase, and he told Gandhi, more or less over his shoulder, that he was not qualified to go to England to study.

  Gandhi wasn’t put off; and he wasn’t put off later by the religious objections of some of his family and caste to his crossing the black water. And yet he had very little idea of what he was going to. He hadn’t read anything about England. It filled him with distaste—his own word—to read anything not a school book. He had never read a newspaper. He had no idea of the history of India. All that he knew of his own religion was what he had seen in his family. He had listened to readings of the Ramayana. From a family maid he had learned the virtue of repeating the name of Rama. He knew a few moralistic Gujarati plays. On certain festival days he had heard the Gita read aloud, but it had made no great impression on him. It is hard in India today, in a time of television and cinema and newspapers and constant political debate, to enter a mind so culturally denuded as Gandhi’s was in 1887; nearly every apparently promising cultural beginning ends in a blank.

  And yet he was in a fever to go to England. He rode over every caste obstacle. In his enthusiasm and blindness at this stage he was like Rahman eleven years later, in 1898, obstinate in his wish to go to Surinam (though Rahman fudges an important part of his story here, losing seven years, saying only of his Surinam passion, the many months in the disagreeable depots in Kanpur and Fyzabad, that he had signed up because he was bored by the routine of his life).

  The comparison of Rahman with Gandhi can’t be pushed too far, though both men appear at this stage to be untutored country boys seeking to make their way. In 1891 the seventeen-year-old Rahman, at the end of his simple schooling, is happy to be offered a job as a primary-school teacher for nine rupees a month (about twelve shillings). Gandhi, with state administrators in his background, and a father earning three hundred rupees a month, would never have been content with nine rupees. And yet Rahman was the vainer of the two. He was full of the idea of his religious learning, his knowledge (though a Muslim) of the Ramayana of India; he felt himself to be the equal of a Brahmin. He never in the course of his long life went beyond this little learning; and he sank without unhappiness into the Surinam bush, cherishing his village glory to the end.

  Gandhi was the opposite of vain. His journeys out of India, first to England and then to South Africa, made him see that he had everything to learn. It was the basis of his great achievement.

  Gandhi was fifty-five when he began dictating his autobiography in weekly instalments, one short chapter a week, for his magazine Navajivan. He was dictating, in Gujarati, to his trusted secretary and translator into English, Mahadev Desai, who also took part in many of Gandhi’s political campaigns. Writer and translator couldn’t have been closer; in its English translation the book sings, and for the first seventy or so chapters the writer is sufficiently far away from the events he is describing for the matter to be well sifted in his own mind. He is direct and wonderfully simple; the narrative is ordered. These early chapters have the quality of a fairytale, and it is possible while reading them to forget that the writer is a full-time politician, the creator of a movement unlike any other in India, and often uncertain of the next turn to take. Halfway through the book, in his account of events in South Africa, there is a narrative fracture; the politician and lawyer, the writer of letters and petitions, swamps the storyteller. It isn’t only that he has already written a book about South Africa; it is also that as he is dictating his weekly instalments he begins to be overtaken by political events around him in India. It spoils the book, but Gandhi was not concerned with literature; and there is enough of the magical early part for the book to be considered a masterpiece.

  I have read the book many times, and at each reading I see something new. The early narrative is so easy and beguiling that one can read too fast; and as with a certain kind of appetising fiction, one can gobble up details, forgetting them as one reads, or not remembering all. As a child, when parts of the book were read to me, I saw the painful fairytale, at a time when Indian independence was still some years away. In my thirties, when India was independent and Gandhi himself long dead, I could read the book as a book. I saw its strange deficiencies: the absence of landscape, the extraordinarily narrow view of England and London in 1888–91: no attempt to describe the great city that must surely have overwhelmed the young man from Rajkot, no theatres or music halls, everything disappearing in his quest for vegetarian food and in his wish to stay faithful to the three vows he had made to his mother before leaving Rajkot: no meat, no alcohol, no women.

  Everyone who has read about Gandhi’s three years in London knows about his dancing lessons, his violin lessons (to help him “hear” the music for his dancing classes), his buying of a violin (one absurdity leading to the other), and his wish, with the help of Bell’s Standard Elocutionist, with its extraordinary line illustrations of oratorical gestures, to master the art of public speaking. Bell, he says, making a little joke, rang an alarm for him. He abandoned his elocution lessons (he had paid a guinea down for three lessons, and he had had two). He took back the violin to the shop, gave up his violin lessons (the woman teacher approved of the giving up) and his dancing lessons. (Bell was one of the books in my father’s little library; perhaps, missing Gandhi’s point, he had been guided to it by Gandhi’s autobiography.)

  London, though, was much more than this kind of frivolity for Gandhi. He couldn’t forget that his brother was paying for everything, and he was a diligent student, prompted in that by the same moral sense that kept him obsessed by the vows he had made to his mother. The law exams could have been done after a few months of selective study. He thought it would have been fraudulent for him to do so; the law books had cost him much money. The logic is strange; but he decided to read all the books. He read through the common law of England in nine hard months; and he thought he should read Roman law in Latin.

  One forgets as one reads, Gandhi’s narrative is so beguiling. I had remembered the awkwardness, the shyness of the young man in England. The revelation for me in this last reading was Gandhi the diligent law student, reading Justinian in Latin, avoiding short cuts for moral reasons. It explains his emphasis later on law and procedure. All through the autobiography there are clues to Gandhi’s later behaviour.

  THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS met in Kanpur in 1925. Gandhi would have been
deep in his autobiography at this time; and by an extraordinary chance we have a literary witness of the Congress occasion. Aldous Huxley was thirty-one, and full of energy (he had promised his publishers two books a year). In 1925 he was for a while in India, doing a round-the-world journal for Jesting Pilate, published in 1926. He was a London intellectual—belonging, in his own words, “to that impecunious but dignified section of the upper middle class which is in the habit of putting on dress-clothes to eat”—and he was travelling fast, travelling and writing, doing the famous sights, and, more or less successfully, working up new ideas about them, never taking the name of Kipling. Still, it is unexpected finding him here in awful Kanpur, at this Congress meeting, some years before the Indian freedom movement and the mahatma became well known internationally. Perhaps Forster’s A Passage to India, published the previous year, though an entirely different kind of book, had put ideas in his head.

  There were about eight thousand people at the Kanpur Congress. They were in a tent about a hundred yards long and sixty yards wide, with a light roof of brown canvas, and they were all seated on matting on the ground. Whereas earlier in the century (according to Nehru) there would have been delegates in morning coat and striped trousers, now they were all in Indian dress and many were wearing the boat-shaped white cotton cap which was already known as the Gandhi cap. The meeting went on for three days, six hours the first day, seven hours the second, and finally nine hours, speeches all the time, and no food.

  Huxley, though very young, was treated with great regard. Some people might have thought he was Professor Huxley; this had happened before in India. He was given a place on the platform, which would have been raised in some way so that speakers could be seen. But even on the platform people sat on the floor; and at the end of the last, nine-hour day Huxley (immensely tall, to add to his troubles) was all but dead of fatigue. But he had had a very clear view of Gandhi, one of the main speakers; and his brisk but sharp pen portrait of the mahatma (still little known abroad) was one that would be followed by later writers: the small emaciated man, with a shawl over his naked shoulders, the shaved head, the big ears, the “rather foxy” features, the easy laugh.

  He was talking about the position of Indians in South Africa, but to Huxley’s surprise there had been no great welcoming applause for him and no respectful hush while he spoke. People talked and fidgeted all the time; some called for water; some got up and went outside and came back again. Huxley, as a traveller too concerned with interpreting the externals of things, had not thought to provide himself with a translator (which would have been easy), and so we have no account from him of what Gandhi said.

  The Gandhi who had presented himself to Huxley and the Kanpur Congress was iconic (the word can’t be avoided) and complete, someone who might have been thought to be perfectly Indian, always there. But the emaciated small man in a dhoti with a shawl over his bare shoulders was a creation; he had been created step by step, personal experiment by personal experiment—in London, South Africa, and India—over thirty years; and the book he was dictating in these weeks to his secretary Mahadev Desai, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, one small chapter a week, was the story of that creation. Huxley would not have known anything of that work, which was appearing in a small-circulation Indian weekly the mahatma had founded. And yet, with his interest in mysticism and spirituality, Huxley could consider the externals and arrive at an original and rather fine appreciation of the figure and the Indian setting before him.

  Huxley saw a lot. The Kanpur occasion—which should have been solemn, and yet wasn’t, with delegates chatting and moving about while their great man spoke about the pain of South Africa—put him in mind of the Edward Lear rhyme about an old man of Thermopylae, / Who never did anything properly. The rhyme leads into a discussion of the apparent Indian disorder, where too little attention is paid to appearances—where the palace is grand but the decoration casual and out of key, where the maharaja’s Rolls-Royce makes its own statement, but the driver is ragged, blowing his nose in the end of the stylish long tail of his turban. Huxley doesn’t mock; he doesn’t stay with the simple observation. He wonders whether in India externals aren’t merely allowed to be externals; which is remarkable for a man of his background in 1925.

  But Gandhi, remarkably for a man of his limited origin, had long before grown to see in India what Huxley saw. In 1901 Gandhi, after eight years in South Africa, had gone back to India; he intended that return to be permanent, but it wasn’t. Gandhi was thirty-two (more or less the age of Huxley of Jesting Pilate). The Congress was meeting that year in Calcutta; and Gandhi, young as he was, and with no Indian reputation, thought he should go there to talk about the position of Indians in South Africa (twenty-four years later this was again his subject in Kanpur: he was pertinacious). He had introductions to important people and he was given five minutes to introduce his resolution. He had developed speaking skills in South Africa; but he was horribly nervous in the great Congress with its many famous orators. He had been talking for three minutes when the bell went.

  This was to warn him that he had two minutes more; but he took it to mean that he had to stop, and he stopped and sat down. He was wounded; other people had spoken for half an hour and more, and no bell had rung for them. Still, he was applauded, hands were raised, and his resolution was passed. It was something, though in 1901 every Congress speaker was applauded and every resolution was passed.

  More unsettling to him than the speech he had had to make were the “appointments” of the occasion—Mahadev Desai’s old-fashioned word for the lodging arrangements and the cooking arrangements and the sanitary arrangements. In the autobiography he writes about them before he writes about the speech. He was put up in Ripon College (named after a viceroy). There were “volunteers” everywhere, to help the delegates. But neither the delegates nor the volunteers had any idea of service. The delegates, a little bit at sea, called ceaselessly for volunteers to do this and do that, and the volunteers, at sea themselves, tried to pass on the requests to other volunteers. So Ripon College rang with people calling for volunteers and giving orders and nothing happening.

  It wasn’t like South Africa at all. Gandhi—only thirty-two—made friends with some volunteers and tried in the short time they had together—the Congress lasted just three days—to tell them about the secret of service and what he used to do in South Africa. In his autobiography he says the volunteers were ashamed when they heard what he had to say. My feeling is that Gandhi, writing in 1925, when it was in his power to persuade people to do anything, was pitching it too strong. The Calcutta volunteers of 1901 wouldn’t have understood what the young stranger from South Africa (only a five-minute man or a three-minute man in the speaking hall) was saying. They would have been bemused rather than ashamed by his attempt to instruct them; though, in the Indian way, they would have been polite.

  There were other “appointments.” The Tamil delegates were exceedingly fearful of pollution. They had worked out that the rules of their caste forbade them being seen cooking or eating by anyone else. Heaven knows what rites or penance they would have had to go through to undo the pollution if it had occurred; and so a windowless wicker enclosure—a “close safe,” Gandhi says in his wicked way—was set up for them in the grounds of Ripon College. Within this enclosure, smoke-filled and choking, they cooked and ate and washed and by their lights were perfectly secure.

  Gandhi was appalled. He had spent eight years campaigning against anti-Indian racial legislation in South Africa. It was the worst kind of let-down to find this travesty of the law of caste, as he saw it—comic and absurd, but as bad as anything he had found in South Africa—here in Calcutta, in the heart of the Congress, which was meant to show India the way ahead.

  As for the other “appointments”: twenty-four years later, when he was dictating the autobiography, he was still oppressed by the stink of the latrines in Ripon College. The volunteers, when he mentioned it, said the latrines were not their respo
nsibility; that was for the sweepers. He asked for a broom and, already the complete Gandhian, he began to clean the latrines. He seems to suggest that he would have cleaned the latrines for everybody, but the rush was too great, with all the delegates, and he decided in the end to clean only for himself. The other delegates didn’t mind the stench, he thought. During the night some of the delegates fouled the verandahs. In the morning he pointed out the spots to the volunteers; but again, they were not interested. Gandhi took it on himself to clean up, and he found no one willing to “share the honour” with him.

  It was said of Indians in South Africa, to explain the prejudice and the legislation against them, that they lived in insanitary conditions. Gandhi was sensitive on this point. Being Gandhi, he couldn’t deny what was said. But it might have been thought that in Calcutta in 1901, when he saw the dreadful latrine behaviour of the Congress delegates, he would have wondered about his cause. It would have been understandable if he had thought of washing his hands of the Indian cause in South Africa and India; if he had decided that eight years of hard public life were enough, that the people weren’t worth the pain, and the time had come for him to withdraw, to stick to his law practice and live privately. But he didn’t; it is his greatness.